Legacy
by Safe to Sway
Summary: Cloud Strife seems to welcome death's arrival as he meets it through the source of all his torment: Sephiroth. But one particular SOLDIER in the afterlife has a way different opinion, and approach, on the matter. YAOI. Cloud x Zack.


_This idea has been gnawing at my brain for quite some time so I thought I'd give it a go. This is merely a prologue with the first chapter in the works and soon to be posted. The rating will most likely go up as this story progresses. _

_I own nothing. Those rights and privileges belong to Square Enix._

_Enjoy!_

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For hours Cloud Strife had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects as you lie sunk in the tasseled meadow-grasses and look up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless and unsuggestive blue.

Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through him, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake his stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which he felt himself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but now they were at an end. Through hid mind, long harried by grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that he was leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of torture and devastation, gathered in the length of journeys half-forgotten through his mind where now only moved a few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that he had swallowed his last draught of breath.

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening obscurity which enveloped him; a dusk now filled with pale lilies, circling softly, interminably before him, now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And into this darkness he felt himself sinking with the gentle sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around him, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace his relaxed and tired body, now submerging his chest and shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over his throat to his chin, to his ears, to his mouth…ah, now it was rising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed…his mouth was full…he was choking…Help!

Once the struggle had again diminished to acceptance, he stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in front of him. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars expanded gradually before his eyes in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which he had of late emerged.

He stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, as his eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about him. He distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distinct shapes—the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stenciling of trees along its curve—something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the imagination into regions of comforting familiarity. As he gazed, his heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise he read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

A single sword, proud and true, was held honorable and glorious in the hand of legacy…

"You best head back where you came from, Cloud," a raven eyelash brushed a smile-plumped cheek as it lowered in a jovial wink, "Don't worry, I'll be right behind ya!"

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_If this reads like it is worth continuing, please honor me with your review!_

_STS_


End file.
